The invention refers to an apparatus for fanning out and evenly distributing wire coils continuously emerging from a rolling mill onto a conveyor arranged following a laying apparatus for putting the coils in place with a rotating laying tube. The conveyor is succeeded by a collecting station for the wire coils in bundles. The laying apparatus is preceeded by a cutting apparatus for the incoming wire.
Installations of this kind are used for cooling, or for heat treatment of the hot wire coming from the rolling mill, whereby the conveyor is generally constructed so that a heat treatment medium, such as air, may pass through the fanned-out wire coils, as well as the conveyor conveying the wire.
The mill operator endeavors, essentially, to charge billets of great weight, if possible, in order to produce a high yield. Furthermore, part of the wire-processing industry has a decided interest in wire bundles of heavy weight. At the same time, there exists a demand for wire bundles of low weight for further use of existing processing plants. The demand for wire bundles of low weight is covered by subdividing the wire.
It is already known to have a cutting device, such as shears, precede the laying apparatus subdividing the arriving hot wire strand (DE-OS 20 38 747). This device, however, is only suitable for the cutting off of the head or starting pieces which, immediately after having been deposited onto the conveyor, must be removed by hand, because removal in the subsequent bundle formation chamber at the end of the conveyor can only be done with unreasonably great expenditure. This kind of removal is dangerous not only because the hot divided coils, after fanning out onto the conveyor, are still superimposed and thus entwined, but also because it is time-consuming and disturbs the otherwise continuous and automatic process of fanning out and forming bundles.
The subdivision into small bundles was heretofore usually done within the bundle formation chamber, and to this end a gripper device was introduced into the path of the coils to be collected, while simultaneously retaining successive coils, in order to feed the wire thus isolated to a cutting device. However, this method represents always a considerable source of disturbance in the otherwise continuous process, as the wires, being of different thickness and strength, behave very differently.
Based on this, the invention is intended to improve the apparatus to fan out wire coils so that when severing the wire before entrance into the laying apparatus, disturbance-free automatic severance and removal of the severed wire coils and/or bundles is possible even at high wire rolling speeds. This is achieved by providing, two convergent speed-controlled conveyors, each with a coordinated laying apparatus, which precede one shared conveyor.
Thus, the continuously arriving wire strands may be fed to one or the other of the two laying devices and their coordinated conveyors by means of a switch coordinated with the cutting apparatus, while one of the conveyors is set for a lower speed than the other conveyor. The slower speed causes a tighter coil placement and at the same time a delay in the transfer of the succeeding wire strand to the shared conveyor, so that there is spacing between the coils of the preceding and succeeding wire strands. This distance is necessary and sufficient to remove the bundle from the preceding wire strand at the end of the shared conveyor in the bundle formation chamber before the next bundle is formed.
Another considerable advantage of the proposed apparatus is that the dual laying apparatus makes available at the same time a substitute laying apparatus so that in case of disturbance or maintenance work it is still possible to work in the conventional manner with the remaining laying apparatus.
Furthermore, it must be stressed that this invention makes it possible to roll endlessly, for example by means of welding together the charged billets, since subdivision into the desired bundle weights is possible at any desired location. Preferably, the laying devices are arranged side by side with the converging conveyors in a horizontal plane. However, the laying devices may be superimposed one above the other. The following conveyors are then superimposed in such a way that a passage remains between the upper and the lower conveyor for the wire coils transported on the lower conveyor. In this proposal, the wire coils transported on the upper conveyor bridge the distance between the upper and lower conveyor in a free fall.
The laying devices may be superimposed, according to the invention, and the converging conveyors are superimposed in such a way that at least one of the conveyors pivots around a pivot point into the plane of the shared conveyor and back again. With this arrangement, for example, one of the conveyors may be linguiform, whereby the tongue is always raised when the other conveyor transports the wire coils to the shared conveyor, and is lowered when the wire coil end has passed the range of the first conveyor.
Examples of the invention are shown on the drawing and are explained as follows: